By the BBC. In case they've changed it by the time you read this, I took a screen grab:
UPDATE 12.31: they have now amended the opening sentences for at least the second time today and they now read as follows: "One in five workers fears losing job, survey suggests. Twenty per cent of UK workers fear for their jobs, a survey has suggested..."
Friday, 4 February 2011
BBC doesn't do grammars
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10 comments:
I actually understand their difficulty in forming the sentence, English having no gender neutral third person singular pronoun makes people reach for "their" and "they" to take the place of that missing word. The rest of the sentence constructs itself backwards from that point.
"One in five UK workers is fearful for his job"
Nope. Sexist.
"One in five UK workers is fearful for her job".
Silly; men and women have jobs.
"One in five UK workers is fearful for their job".
Oh dear, now the verb is singular.
"One in five UK workers are fearful for their job".
Now the noun is singular. Damnit.
"One in five UK workers are fearful for their jobs".
There. Perfect.
English is an appallingly badly designed language really isn't it?
It's made worse because American English is what people hear from their media in take. In which case group nouns are plural in American and (sensibly) singular in English.
en_US: "The government are shit"
en_GB: "The government is shit"
It doesn't actually apply in the example you give, which is wrong whichever side of the Atlantic you live, but it conditions ears to allow monstrosities like "one workers are very angrys".
OP, sure, we can argue whether "is" or "are" is better, but the BBC committed the worst mistake ever and that was to use both versions in consecutive sentences (see screen grab; they've amended the online version).
I hadn't even noticed that.
That's the writing equivalent of kids (I never do this, no never, as I am a grown adult who knows how to spell) writing both spellings of a word on top of each other in the hope that the teacher will give them the benefit of the doubt.
I'm sure it's because of the unique way the BBC is funded.
One thing that irritates me about the BBC website's slapdash attitude to grammar is that people who aren't confident with their own grammar might assume that the BBC is right and then imitate it.
Alternative "Due to our contant Cutbacks Hype one in five workers is fearful for their jobs"
"workers" sounds arcane. They say one in five then switch to 20% . Arbitrary.
What can you expect when they don't teach grammar and word usage in leftist dominated schools, i.e. the majority.
@Deniro
Sorry, the pedant in me can't be quiet.
"Due to" is almost always used incorrectly.
"Due to heavy rain, the fields were flooded" means that the fields are due to rain.
The correct phrase is
"Owing to heavy rain, the fields were flooded"
These days, nobody cares enough to treat them as different, but officially "due" is an adjective and adjectives apply to nouns, the only nouns available are "fields" and "rain".
There are some who say it can be rephrased to keep "due" and use it correctly like this:
"The flooding of the fields was due to heavy rain"
However, I'm not convinced. I don't really see how the rephrasing alters the problem that "due to" is to be treated as an adjective.
Personally, I tend to be forgiving of grammar mistakes in blogs, comments, emails, sms, speech, etc. Anything done off the cuff, at high speed; especially when they are simply thinkos or typos (my fingers refuse to stop adding apostrophes at any opportunity). However, reporters are being paid to write -- and then, an effort should be made; and the editor should be responsible for final quality.
Anyone who reads Facebook knows that grammar will be dead in one generation.
I think you may be wrong. One in five workers is shorthand for a group comprising 20% of all workers. It is correct to use "their" in this context. Example: you might say, "The crowd (singular-acting as one entity) surges forward"; But you wouldn't say,"The crowd is wearing red jackets". Look it up in an English grammar text book.
Anon, I agree that "one five workers" is plural, so "one in five workers fear for their jobs" is correct.
But the BBC did a mix and match job - the headline used singular ("fears losing job") and the first sentence used plural ("are fearful for their jobs"), and the most fundamental rule of grammar all is to be consistent.
For example, Americans write "humor" and not "humour" so if an American writes a whole article consistently using the spelling "humor" then that is fine, but if somebody writes and article alternating between "humor" and "humour" then that looks like shit.
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